Pages

Saturday, 31 August 2013

Witches: Queens and Crones and Little Girls

The
witches from children’s fiction who appeared in my last post were all
wicked. But their authors wrote about them with humour, and a relish for the sheer
range of social possibilities open to a character possessing magical
powers and zero scruples. Miss Smith, Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and Madam
Mim are most unlovable, but we can thoroughly enjoy their subversive
wickedness in complete assurance that all will be well in the end.
Theirs is the evergreen appeal of seeing someone behave
appallingly badly in ways you secretly long to do yourself,
but haven't the nerve.

In this post, though, I’m thinking about some much darker witches, whose
authors take them – and expect us to take them – very seriously. All the examples in this post are from books
I've been reading and rereading for years, and deeply admire.
These witches are quite diverse, but two things are constant: they are
all bad characters, and we are not expected to feel any secret sympathy
for them.

And you can forget about the old crone with nutcracker nose and chin,
wearing a pointed hat and riding on a broomstick. Instead, we meet a
range of variants on the ‘witch queen’ theme, plus a scatter of
adherents to black magic including a scholar, a postmistress and a
little girl.

The witch queen is a stereotype as old as the hills, coming down to
us from many an ancient goddess (Ishtar, Astarte, Diana Queen of the
Night) whose worship was suppressed. This picture of Medea by the
Pre-Raphaelite Frederick Sandys suggests the type. Patriarchal
monotheism doesn’t go in for powerful females. They’re difficult to keep
out, as the cult of the Madonna shows – but the Madonna personifies
male-approved feminine qualities of tenderness, mercy, beauty and
maternal love. Patriarchal systems save the tougher qualities of
justice, wrath, vengeance etc, for the male deity. The Madonna never
said ‘Vengeance is mine’. But Diana had Acteon torn to pieces by his
own hounds.

Descended from disapproved goddesses, it’s usual for fictional witch
queens to be beautiful, sexual women of great power, selfishness and
cruelty. Check out T.H. White’s Morgause, Queen of Orkney, busy – on
the first occasion we meet her – boiling a cat alive, and all for
nothing: nearing the end of the spell, Morgause can’t be bothered to
continue. She’s the mother from hell. Adored by her sons, she
alternately neglects, torments and smothers them. She uses everyone she
meets and is the ruin of most of them. The title of the book in which
she appears, "The Queen of Air and Darkness", comes from the well known
poem by A.E. Housman, worth quoting in full:

Her strong enchantments failing,Her towers of fear in wreck,Her limbecks dried of poisonsAnd the knife at her neck

The Queen of air and darknessBegins to shrill and cry,'O young man, O my slayer.Tomorrow you shall die.'

O Queen of air and darkness,I think 'tis truth you say,And I shall die tomorrow,But you shall die today.

It's an extraordinary conjuration of fear and violence, and antagonism
not only between the sexes but possibly between the generations. There
is no sympathy, no possibility of mercy towards this Queen. She is to
be destroyed as one might kill a snake.

T.H. White was a man tormented by his own sexuality and suppressed
sado-masochistic tendencies. He had a terrible relationship with his own
mother, and once wrote to his friend David Garnett (asking him to call
on her), “She is a witch, so look out, if you go.” In Elisabeth
Brewer’s critical work, ‘T.H. White’s The Once and Future King’, 1993,
White is quoted as describing Morgause thus:

She should have all the frightful power and mystery of women. Yet
she should be quite shallow, cruel, selfish…One important thing is her
Celtic blood. Let her be the worst West-of-Ireland type: the one with
cunning bred in the bone. Let her be mealy-mouthed: butter would not
melt in it. Yet also she must be full of blood and power.

Blood and power (and racism): White is clearly very frightened of this
woman, who both fascinates and repels him. He didn’t find his Morgause
in Malory. Malory’s Queen Morgawse isn’t even an enchantress like her
half-sister Morgan Le Fay. ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’ presents her as a great
lady whose sins are adulterous rather than sorcerous. No: White created
his Morgause out of his own fears and loathings.

Whether or not ‘The Once and Future King’ is really a book for children –
I first read it as a young teen – the Narnia books certainly are, and
contain two excellent examples of the Witch Queen: Jadis of ‘The
Magician’s Nephew’, who reappears as the White Witch in ‘The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe’; and the Green Witch of ‘The Silver Chair’, who
shares many characteristics with fairy queens of the Unseelie Court.
(But let’s stick to witches for now.) Jadis is proud, cruel, ruthless
and ambitious, and as the White Witch and usurper of Narnia, actually
sacrifices Aslan the Lion. Lewis traces her descent from Lilith and – in
‘The Magician’s Nephew’ – she is seen stealing the apples of Life in a scene
echoing the transgression of Eve. The comedy of the chapter in which
she riots through London, balancing on top of a hansom cab as if it were
a chariot, does suggest some wicked delight on the part of the
author – perhaps mostly because of Uncle Andrew’s complete
discomfiture. Lewis is making a point about different types of evil: where Uncle Andrew is slimy and small-minded, Jadis has beauty, style and magnificence: but we are not to
approve of either of them. The Green Lady, by contrast, is softly spoken,
charming, ‘feminine’ – and sly, dangerous and deceitful. Women, Lewis
clearly feels, should be neither domineering nor manipulative…

Celtic legends have provided the attributes of many a witch-queen of
modern times. The foremost is Alan Garner’s ‘the Morrigan’, a name
borrowed from Irish legend and originally probably that of a war
goddess. The name is variously translated as Great Queen or Phantom
Queen. At any rate, in Garner’s ‘The Weirdstone of
Brisingamen’ and ‘The Moon of Gomrath’, she appears as the death or
crone aspect of the triple Moon Goddess: the roles of maiden and mother
being taken respectively by the young heroine Susan, and the Lady of the
Lake Angharad Goldenhand. Dividing up the feminine in this way allows
the author to approve maiden and mother (on the time-honoured Madonna
pattern) while disapproving the crone. The Morrigan isn’t all that old,
but she seems so to Susan, and is physically unattractive:

She looked about forty-five years old, was powerfully built (“fat”
was the word Susan used to describe her), and her head rested firmly
upon her shoulders without appearing to have much of a neck at all. Two
deep lines ran from wither side of her nose to the corners of her wide,
thin-lipped mouth, and her eyes were rather too small for her broad
head. Strangely enough her legs were long and spindly, so that in
outline she resembled a well-fed sparrow, but again that was Susan’s
description… Her eyes rolled upwards and the lids came down till only an
unpleasant white line showed; and then she began to whisper to herself.

('But again that was Susan's description' - this is oddly arch, for
Garner. It's as if he's disassociating himself from Susan's opinion:
the subtext is that you might not want to believe her - but why?
Because Susan might be jealous? Because you can't ever wholly trust
what one female says about another?)

Anyway. Frightening, powerful, ruthless, the Morrigan wastes no time in
trying to conjure the children into her car so that she can take the
‘Bridestone’ from Susan. Later, in the second book, ‘The Moon of
Gomrath’, the Morrigan is revealed in her true strength. In a chapter
which still makes my spine prickle after years of re-reading, Susan
faces the Morrigan outside the ruined house which is only ‘there’ in the
moonlight:

Now Susan felt the true weight of her danger, when she looked into
eyes that were as luminous as an owl’s with blackness swirling in their
depths. The moon charged the Morrigan with such power that when she
lifted her hand even the voice of the stream died, and the air was sweet
with fear.

Susan and the Morrigan vie with one another, black and silver lances of
power jetting from their mirror-opposite bracelets, and when at last
Susan wins by blowing the horn of Angharad Goldenhand, it’s an
all-female victory by which the world is unsettlingly changed: Susan’s
brother Colin hears a sound ‘so beautiful he never found rest again’,
and ‘the Old Magic was free for ever, and the moon was new.’ Is this a
good thing or a bad thing? Garner’s answer appears to be that it’s an
unavoidable natural force, and each individual will have to come to his
or her own terms with it.

Powerful, magical, beautiful as the books are, Garner is forced into an
awkward distinction between the Black Magic supposedly practised by the
Morrigan, and the Old Magic of the elemental Wild Hunt and the moon
maidens Susan and Angharad. It seems a little illogical to brand the
Old Moon as evil while the New and Full Moons are good… I’m not sure
quite where the Morrigan’s evil really resides, and I think LeGuin would
say that we need to accept the darkness as well as the light. (In Garner's recent sequel, 'Boneland' he take a fresh look at the Morrigan.) But the
books are brilliant, and the Morrigan is another unforgettable
witch-queen.

Moving on from the Celtic goddesses, we come to some witches of more
mundane appearance. First, Emma Cobley of Elizabeth Goudge’s ‘Linnets
and Valerians’. Goudge was a spiritual, religious writer: also an
intelligent, questioning one, and there are some moving passages in her
adult books about the trials of mental illness. She was conscious of
goodness as a great force, and of evil as a force almost as strong. In
this book, Emma Cobley is an elderly postmistress of humble background;
as a young, vivid girl she was in love with Hugo Valerian, the squire;
and when he married the doctor’s daughter Alicia, in jealous hatred she
cast spells on him and his wife and child. Spells for ‘binding the
tongue’, for causing loss of memory, for ‘a coolness to come between a
man and a woman’: little images carved of mandrake root with pins
piercing the tongue or heart. Emma keeps the village shop, full of
tempting sweets like the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel, and owns a
black cat which can change size. The wickedness in the book is an
expression of the capacity of the human soul to cling to destructive
passions.

As
is the acquisitiveness of the next witch: Dr Melanie D. Powers, of Lucy
Boston’s ‘An Enemy at Green Knowe’. (For those who don’t know the Green
Knowe series, it’s a set of gentle but eerie ghost stories set in Lucy
Boston’s own wonderful 11th century manor house, and I can’t praise it
too highly.) The grandson of the house, Tolly, and his friend Ping, pit
themselves against his grandmother’s new neighbour, a prying, malicious
woman, a Cambridge don and scholar of the occult, who has – we slowly
realise – struck a Faustian bargain with the devil. She has got wind of
an ancient occult manuscript to be found in the manor house, and will
stop at nothing to get hold of it. Miss Powers (who has an
unaccountable dislike of passing in front of a mirror) invites herself
to tea at the manor, and makes ultra-sweet conversation with such
ominous lines as:

“One can sense that yours is a very happy family. Happy families are
not so frequent as people make out. And unfortunately they are easily
broken up. Very easily.”

She refuses to take a small cake:

“Grown-ups do better without extra luxuries like that. It is enough for me to look at them.”

In fact, it seemed to Tolly that she could not take her eyes off
them… About half an hour later when tea was over… Mrs Oldknowe offered
to lead the way upstairs to see the rest of the house. Miss Powers was
standing with her back to the table, her hands clasped behind her,
lingering to look at the picture over the fireplace, when Tolly… saw one
of the little French cakes move, jerkily, as if a mouse were pulling
it. Then it slid over the edge of the plate… and into the twiddling
fingers held ready for it behind Miss Powers’ back.

And this tells us everything we need to know about Miss Powers. Petty,
deceitful, covetous, full of malice, she is a truly evil person. The
damage she causes is real: the boys’ beloved grandmother, Mrs Oldknowe,
is nearly defeated by her; and the triumph of good over evil – the grand
climax when, in the midst of a total eclipse of the sun, her demon is
finally driven out of her – is only precariously achieved.

Pettiness and selfish ambition are qualities lavishly displayed by
Gwendolen Chant, of Diana Wynne Jones’ ‘Charmed Life’. Wynne Jones
writes even-handedly about good and evil witches, warlocks and wizards,
but Gwendolen is one of the worst of the bunch. What Wynne Jones
despises above all is exploitation of others and betrayal of trust.
Gwendolen, a pretty girl with blue eyes and golden hair, exploits and
betrays her younger brother Cat to the extent of actually causing his
death on several occasions – since Cat, as she knows and he doesn’t, is a
nine-lifed enchanter. Gwendolen uses his extra lives to enhance her
own powers of witchcraft. Like some of the witches I wrote about last
week, Gwendolen has no problem with the sort of anti-social behaviour
which can be entertaining to behold – as Cat says, ‘I quite liked some
of the things she did’ – but we are left in no doubt that she has gone
too far when she conjures up what we later discover to be the
apparitions of Cat’s lost lives:

The first was like a baby that was too small to walk – except that it
was walking, with its big head wobbling. The next was a cripple, so
twisted and cramped upon itself that it could barely hobble. The third
was… pitiful, wrinkled and draggled. The last had its white skin barred
with blue stripes. All were weak and white and horrible.

So there’s the range of seriously presented evil witches in children’s
fiction, from glamorous witch queens to extremely nasty little girls. All of the witch queens I could call to mind have been created by
men; women writers have created more domestic and less obviously
dramatic characters. I leave you to decide what the different examples
say, individually, about the various authors’ attitudes to women. Next post will
be about the sympathetic presentation of witches – children’s books
where witches are given an altogether more positive aspect.

5 comments:

However hard the author tries to disapprove, these witch queens still have a powerful appeal. They are an archetype - the undeniable and inescapable opposite of life, warmth, growth: death, decay, waning, cold. In the most ancient religions - and, I think, still, in Hinduism today, goddesses are seen both as givers and creators of life, and the destroyers of it. Kali is a 'fierce aspect' of Parvati, a gentle mother goddess, and symbolises Time (which brings Death) and is also a destroyer of evil forces. - When an author creates 'a witch queen' they're tapping into all of this, whether they're entirely conscious of it or not. (And the security word I had to type to prove I'm not a robot was 'upmount' which seems oddly apt for witch queens.)

Fascinating post! I wonder what you would make of Miskaella, the anti-heroine of Margo Lanagan's Sea Hearts? She's not a witch in the traditional sense and has only one power, to bring beautiful women out of seals, but what she does destroys a lot of lives, and yet there is also a touch of sympathy for her. Just a touch!

Sue, I love that book ('The Brides of Rollrock Island' it's called over here)& I agree, there is sympathy for her - she's a complex character. Traditional witch? Yes, in the sense of wise woman - or even oracle? - the power that grants the wish that was unwise to ask...

Followers

Note on copyright

As I'm about to welcome a number of guest writers to this blog, I thought a brief note about copyright would be in order. All posts and guest posts on this blog remain the copyright of whoever is the author. Obviously brief quotes are always fine, but if you would like to quote extensively from or reproduce any post in full, please seek permission from the author in the usual fashion. Many thanks for your co-operation.